The conquest of Cicero, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, which was started by John Torio and was completed by Al Capone, was started out of necessity, and it was accomplished in Torio's usual style, without spilling a single drop of blood.

Well, mostly.

At first, anyway.

In order to move their operations to Cicero, Torio and Capone first had to work things out with

the west side O'Donnells, Klondike, Miles, and Bernard, who not only counted their territory as the

area around Madison Street and Chicago Avenue on the west side, but were also firmly entrenched

in the Cicero political machine, the town's backroom dealmaker, Eddie Vogel.

Joseph C. Klinho was the Cicero President, a title that was the equivalent of mayor,

and he took his orders from Vogel, the O'Donnells, and Eddie Tancel, a former prize fighter who had

retired after killing a man in the ring and had later opened a saloon in Cicero called the Hawthorne Park Cafe.

Cicero, well, obviously politically correct, was otherwise relatively crime-free in those days.

It was an adjacent suburb of about 60,000 people who were mainly first and second generation Slavic immigrants. They were industrious,

hardworking people who generally worked in the nearby factories, or for Western Electric,

the area's largest employer. They liked beer, and they didn't mind breaking the law to get it.

There were few other vices in Cicero, though. There were no brothels,

and gambling was limited to slot machines, and the owners of those kicked back to Vogel.

Torio devised a bloodless plan to invade Cicero. He began the first phase of that plan in October 1923 by moving several dozen prostitutes into a house he'd rented on Roosevelt Road.

As he expected, the local police raided the place and locked up the girls.

Torio then opened another brothel at Ogden in 52nd with the same result.

Without protest, he closed both houses. He had no clout in Cicero, but he did have Cook County

officials in his pocket, like Sheriff Peter B. Hoffman. Two days after the Ogden Avenue raid,

Hoffman at Torio's suggestion, sent a squad of

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